


truth will out (you)

by andawaywego



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Brief Language, F/F, Outside POV fic, mentions of sexual situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 07:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11353065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andawaywego/pseuds/andawaywego
Summary: Everything always comes out eventually. Even Trini and Kimberly.[basically: Trini and Kim's blossoming relationship through the eyes of people who (mostly) don't matter]





	truth will out (you)

**Author's Note:**

> outside POV fic again. oops.
> 
> this goes through 7 different characters (minor through virtually nonexistent in this canon). all mentioned names are characters from some version of Power Rangers cause i wanted to be extra like that. except for Trini's neighbor. he's new. oops.
> 
> this kind of thing exists in other fandoms i've been a part of--like a fun rotation of getting to see our lovely ladies bond through others' eyes--but not in this one as far as i'm aware.
> 
> i've been shamelessly inspired by all those stories i've mentioned above that i've read sooo
> 
> didn't super read for mistakes. i'll check it later. hopefully you like it.

...

When the town nearly collapses under the weight of some giant gold creature that ends up melting and leaving half of Laurel Avenue’s pavement unintentionally gilded, Patrick is in his  hotel room with just a towel around his waist.

June has the boys down at the hotel pool for the afternoon and they’re leaving tomorrow, driving back from Diego and Alex’s soccer tournament first thing in the morning. For a moment, he just stands there, water pooling into the carpet at his feet as he watches the news anchor throw panicked looks at whoever is gesturing off camera. She stutters out a, “It would appear that a group of five individuals people are calling the Power Rangers--”

His first thought is _Trini_.

(His second thought is _June,_ but by then he’s scrambling to grab his phone from where it’s charging on the dresser and it’s ringing and Trini _isn’t answering_ )

Patrick calls her ten times. Each time he gets a voicemail and then the large robot creature that must have stopped the gold thing finishes patting down rubble on top of some hole in the ground and turns around to leave the city. He watches, mouth slightly agape and he calls the neighbors next.

Even sends Carl Franklin over to check if Trini is home, and his heart nearly stops when he gets a call back saying, “No, um...Pat, she’s not here, but I’m sure she’s fine, y’know? I mean, Kathy and I didn’t have any issues over here and I don’t think there were many--”

 _Many_.

Not _none_.

June comes back with the boys, chattering about how great they were that morning--even though their team lost--and Patrick shoots her a wide-eyed look from where he’s standing in that towel. Tries to convey with just a glance that he’s pretty sure he’s having a heart attack.

Figures. His dad had his first one at his age.

And he always assumed it would be Trini that caused it. From that day June went into labor, five weeks early.

They drive right home and twenty minutes from the house, Trini finally calls him.

Says, “No, Dad, I’m fine, I just--”

And, “I wasn’t in town. I was at a friend’s house.”

Then, “ _No_. She lives way outside town. Like...we’re good.”

Patrick breathes a little easier, but June doesn’t and spends the next ten minutes babbling into his cell phone while Trini grumbles on the other end. The boys are in the back watching the newscast on one of their iPads and oohing over the superheroes that saved the city.

Superheroes. Saving the city.

It sounds crazy.

Trini is home when they get there and it’s been awhile since she let him hug her, but she does this time. She lets him scoop her into his arms like it’s three years ago, when she fit a little easier, right there in the driveway.

“I was so worried,” he tells her, and Trini rolls her eyes but she’s smiling.

She looks like her mother when she does that and Patrick hugs her again, feels his wife slide over to wrap her arms around both of them. “I’m fine, guys. Really.”

Eventually she wiggles away. She usually does.

She sleeps in the living room that night because her ceiling looks ready to cave in and her walls are damaged too.

(Patrick makes a mental note to ask Carl Franklin _what happened,_ because he’d said those monsters hadn’t come close to this neighborhood)

June puts sheets on the couch and Patrick stays up late watching the news run the same footage of those Power Rangers over and over again with subtitles like, _Small Town Still Reeling_.

Because he's suddenly remembering his daughter saying something about being a superhero a couple weeks back. And he’d thought she was kidding or something, but a wave of mild panic crashes over him and she hadn't been answering her phone and her room is a mess, and she--

But, no.

Superheroes saving a city is crazy enough.

His daughter being one of them?

Impossible.

It’s late when he finally feels at ease enough to leave Trini alone again and he brushes some of her hair away from her face before he turns off the light and goes upstairs.

He passes by Trini’s room again on his way, intent on inspecting some of the damage again because it’s _so bizarre_ \--the rest of the house is _fine_ \--but he’s stopped at the doorway when he hears a thump from inside. A quiet, “ _Shit_.”

A thousand images jump into his mind at once--some robber scaling the side of the house; a murderer, perhaps; or maybe another monster, the kind that smashed into his daughter’s walls.

What he’s not expecting is a teenage girl sitting at his daughter’s desk by her open window, inspecting her shin like she’s hurt herself.

She’s young, he thinks. Has to be from the way she’s dressed, the way she’s holding herself--like she’s still so unsure of how to carry her own weight--and he thinks she bears a resemblance to someone who waved at Trini outside the high school last week when he’d dropped her off in the morning.

What he can’t figure out is what she’s doing in his house at one in the morning.

“Can I help you?” he asks, trying to sound firm, but amusement and immediate parental concern tinges the outskirts of his tone.

Either way, the girl jumps, her eyes wide as she whips her head up to look at him. “Holy shit!”

Patrick smirks a little when he sees how flustered she gets--the way her hand flies up to her mouth, as if embarrassed or surprised or both.

“Um, sorry!”

He takes a step into the room, holding on the doorknob. “It’s past visiting hours,” he tells her and the girl drops her hand from her mouth and scrambles to her feet like he’s her sergeant or something.

“I, um...I was just…”

He stands there, waiting to see what she’ll come up with, but no real answer comes. He almost wants be grateful that it’s him and not June who came in to find a girl in Trini’s bedroom, looking for her, no doubt. June hadn’t recovered for nearly two weeks after the last time and she’d just walked in on her daughter holding hands with another girl.

This is a whole new level.

One that would likely send his wife into a babbling, worried, awkward mess for the rest of the school year. She’d still be edging around it at Trini’s graduation.

From college.

“Looking for my daughter?” he asks and the girl is silent for a moment, hands clasped nervously in front of her stomach, just sort of hanging midair.

She nods.

“She’s sleeping downstairs,” Patrick explains. “But it’s late. Can I take a message?”

“She is? Oh.”

She looks disappointed and Patrick sighs, looks up to the ceiling doesn’t really know what to say. That’s the problem.

He doesn’t like to think of Trinity as anything other than his daughter--perpetually three-years-old and sitting on his lap in the living room. But now she’s practically an adult.

A practically-adult who has other practically-adults climbing the side of his house to sneak into her window in the middle of the night. He glances back down, eyes shifting to the wall to the right--the one his and June’s room shares. Tries not to wonder how many times this girl has snuck in before and never been caught.

“Anything you’d like me to relay?” he asks again and the girl looks back up at him with even wider eyes, as though grasping at something to say that won’t get her into trouble.

A pang of sympathy ropes through his chest. She seems nice.

He imagines he would really like her if they never met like this again.

“N-no,” she stammers out. “That’s okay. I can just...I’ll just talk to her later, I guess?”

It sounds like a question. Patrick shrugs. He doesn’t have the answer.

“Okay, well, I’ll just…” She gestures back towards the window, as if asking if he’d like to intervene and let her stay. Or go get wake his daughter up.

One or the other.

“Can I at least have a name to give her?” he asks, the corners of his lips tilting up in amusement. “Unless you happen to have a calling card.”

She frowns. He wonders if she even knows what that is.

“Oh, I’m um...Kimberly Hart.”

He knows that name, but he’s not sure where he’s heard it before.

Kimberly Hart jerks forward like she’s seconds away from trying to shake his hand and then seems to think better of it.

“Nice to meet you, Kimberly,” he says, then nods towards the window. “I assume you know the way out?”

It’s meant to be a joke--he’s not that cruel, though she _did_ climb _into_ the house that way--but Kimberly doesn’t seem to understand that.

She steps back onto Trini’s desk and then hoists herself out the window. His heart leaps up in some echo of his earlier worry--standing in that hotel room--but by the time he crosses the room to look out the window (where he half-expects to see her dangling precariously), she’s already crossing the yard to a car parked up the street.

He watches her go and checks on Trini one last time before going to bed.

Trini is quiet at breakfast the next morning--even with June in the kitchen, fussing over the grocery list--but that’s not anything new.

What _is_ new is the face she makes when he says, “Kimberly Hart dropped by last night. Nice girl. Good climber, too.”

He didn’t know she could turn that shade of red.

..

In school, Hannah Appleby had a professor that taught about behavior contracts and offering rewards in exchange for good behavior. He talked about teaching in the public schools of Philadelphia for a while and how he had students who seemed to _encourage_ bad behavior--that almost made him quit teaching entirely.

He also said a lot about how most problems boiled town to classroom management rather than any sort of actual, intended antagonism from the student.

Hannah is pretty sure none of that applies here.

“Principal Fieg,” Mrs. Ott says from the doorway, her knuckles rapping lightly on the door. “The girls are here.”

Hannah chews on her nails a little too loudly and Principal Fieg gives her a worried look. She wants to ask him if she could just sit this one out, but it seems unlikely considering the circumstances.

The _she’s-the-one-who-saw-Trini-throw-Kimberly’s-locker-door-into-her-classroom_ circumstances.

She tries to imagine sliding a behavior contract over to both of them before the next Biology lab, but Trini has made her nervous since day one and she used to think it was just on her--that she was projecting some stereotype onto the quiet, huffy girl who sits in the back of the classroom and glares at anyone who comes too close.

Said, “Whatever,” when Hannah tried to pull her aside after class to ask if she needed more study help before the next test because her last _D_ hadn’t been like her.

She wasn’t projecting, it turns out, and it hits her right then that she hadn’t even _realized_ steroids were a problem for actual teenagers. She sort of just thought that was Hollywood mumbo-jumbo.

“You can send them in,” Principal Fieg says and Mrs. Ott nods. She closes the door on her way out.

Hannah wanders over to the door and looks out to where Mrs. Ott is returning to her desk. She can see the chairs just past, where Trini is sitting beside Kimberly. Kimberly is looking down at her feet and she leans over to say something to Trini who huffs in return and then--

_Cracks her knuckles._

It’s a silly thing to be scared about, but once you see a girl that size rip a door of a locker--

You sort of start reevaluating.

And U.C.L.A. never prepared her for _this_.

They get to their feet when Mrs. Ott speaks and then they’re coming straight for the door.

Hannah scrambles back to her seat beside Principal Fieg’s desk.

“Girls, come in,” he says when the door opens and Kimberly leads the way, taking a seat nervously in front of him. Trini follows obediently behind and Hannah eyes her warily.

She’s scared of both of them, she thinks. Especially now that they seem to be friends.

Because there were rumors last month--before the school had to close until the gym roof got fixed from that monster’s foot--of Kimberly punching another student. She supposes the door that had come flying into her classroom and into Adam Park’s DNA diorama _did_ have a handful of fairly inappropriate and rude phrases written on the front.

Kimberly doesn’t seem like the type to let other people’s opinions get to her, though.

Trini, on the other hand…

“Do you know why you’re here?” Principal Fieg asks and the girls turn their heads in unison so fluidly it seems practiced.

They both look back.

“Can’t say I do, hoss,” Trini says and Hannah can hear Principal Fieg take a deep, steadying breath, as if drawing together enough patience to answer her.

“Then you’re unaware that you damaged school property two weeks ago? Twice.”

Technically, the diorama wasn’t school property, but Hannah is shaking too badly to correct him.

“News to me,” Trini tells them, shrugging.

Kimberly is sitting completely still.

She’s already been in trouble this year, though the specifics on it are shady and Jeff Keller, the sophomore English teacher, hadn’t really spared a lot of details in the teacher’s lounge when he’d told her in passing. Hannah, just two months into her first teaching job, is still outside the inner circle.

But a previous run-in with the law would make sense with the way Kim is holding her shoulders. She looks terrified and maybe ten seconds away from running, though Hannah isn’t sure if that’s quite right because even Kimberly has to know that she has _nowhere to go_.

“I did it,” she blurts out a second later and it’s still in the office.

Deathly so.

“ _Kim_ ,” Trini hisses out between her teeth, turning her head to look at her companion.

Hannah is stunned into silence. It appears that Principal Fieg is too. He looks to her for help she can’t give.

It’s a shock, for sure. The girls hadn’t really spoken to each other until a week before that monster attacked town and when school started back up, they were suddenly begging to switch lab partners so they could sit together, work together.

This was just after Principal Fieg had approached her about doling out a punishment for them concerning the information she’d brought to him regarding the locker, but before they’d tested out breaking the hinges themselves.

Or, rather, _Principal Fieg_ tried, convinced that there was no way someone Trini’s size could do it unless the locker was in severe disrepair. And if _one_ locker was in disrepair, then all of them must be.

He was wrong. The lockers are fine. Perfect, actually.

Hannah returned to her steroid idea.

Now, it’s been a week. The right amount of time, it seemed, to let everyone settle before suspending Trini for it.

Or possibly just giving her detention.

Hannah prays silently for anything other than expulsion because she’s only two months away from paying off her car and her college professor had a student that slashed his tires when he got in trouble for skipping.

She doesn’t really want any stories of her own like that.

“It was me,” Kimberly insists, but it’s clearly a lie. “I broke my locker.”

What Hannah can’t figure out is _why_. Why lie about it when it was obviously Trini?

Trini seems to be wondering the same thing. “No, you didn’t,” Trini says.

Principal Fieg’s eyes are leaping back and forth between them like he’s watching a tennis match and he looks like he nearly wants to believe Kimberly despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

“Yes,” Kimberly says and she’s looking at Trini when she says it. “I did.”

“ _No,_ you didn’t.”

“ _Trini_.”

“ _Kim_.”

Hannah doesn’t know _what_ is going on. She just watches the two girls stare at each other, waiting for something no one seems to really know is coming.

“I did it, Principal Fieg,” Trini confesses suddenly, turning to look at them both. “It was definitely, _definitely_ me and not Kim. I ripped the door off her locker because a bunch of kids wrote some really gross crap all over it and then I chucked it into Ms. Appleby’s room and we bounced.”

She allows this to settle for a moment.

Then says, “Sorry.”

“Oh.” Principal Fieg looks pretty much how Hannah feels and he coughs into his fist, trying to clear his throat. “Well, you’ll be spending the rest of the semester in Saturday detention. I trust your friend, Ms. Hart, can fill you in on the details.”

If the punishment had been decided on _before_ the city was nearly destroyed, Hannah is pretty sure Trini would be facing suspension _at least_. Possibly visiting the idea of expulsion. Her parents would absolutely be sitting in here, too.

As it is, this is more of a show of force than anything, because the school has to spend money on repairs already _anyway_ , so what’s one locker door in the grand scheme of things?

This is just to show that, just because half the town was levelled, doesn’t mean they’re not still serious about rule violations like this one.

“Dope,” Trini says.

She doesn’t even _look_ disappointed. Instead, she looks smug. Like she maybe was hoping for that.

The look she shares with Kimberly beside her doesn’t go unnoticed, but it does pass without Hannah really understanding it.

She’d been expecting a fight. Trini, perhaps, breaking something else or threatening to sue or call her mother or something. She’d been expecting Principal Fieg to somehow order a drug test to test for steroids and then Trini fighting _that_ too.

Principal Fieg looks stunned as ever and at least she’s not alone in that emotion. “Well...I...Go back to class, girls.”

They stand and Trini holds the door open for Kimberly on their way out. Hannah watches them go.

“That could have gone worse,” Principal Fieg says, once they’re gone.

“Yeah,” Hannah says, awed. “It could have.”

When the girls show up for seventh period, Hannah is supremely less scared of them. She watches them enter the room together, talking lowly under their breath, and Trini even grins at her when they take their seats.

Hannah is just about to decide that she doesn’t understand--that she doesn’t _get_ why Trini would even do something like that for a girl she didn’t seem to be friends with last month--when she sees Kimberly brush some of Trini’s hair behind her ear as they talk, the way Trini blushes and looks down at her hands, and then does.

She understands completely.

..

Alpha-5 spends the majority of the night and every afternoon in low power mode. He spent so long in it before that it feels like second nature to just power down the moment the kids are done with training each day.

They come in at four o’clock every day. Right on time.

And then they leave at seven.

So they’re gone already and he’s powered down in the corner of the ship, just inside his little compartment, waiting for them to return tomorrow, when the ship opens back up and there are footsteps.

Quiet voices.

He’s not awake and he can’t quite pick up on the words, but he can hear the tone of them. His sensory index picks up on it, at least. Records it so that he’ll be able to play it over later.

Voices. One of them saying, “I know I left it here somewhere.”

Shuffled steps. “Where did you have it last?”

“I think over here.”

Footsteps again. Moving around below.

Alpha-5 beeps a little in his suspended consciousness.

“Sorry about today,” one of the voices says. Later, Alpha-5--upon remembering this--will recognize her voice patterns as _Kimberly._ “Didn’t mean to hit you.”

“It’s fine.” A clank of something metallic. Then, “Found it.”

“Good. Now you can text me.”

“Who says I wanna use it to text you?”

“No one _says_ it. You just do.”

A pause. They’re shifting outside the circular walls of his chamber.

“Because I’m your favorite,” Kimberly adds.

Alpha-5 will not understand this later, though he’ll play it back a couple of time in his system, trying to make sense of it.

Someone takes in a sharp breath. Were he awake, he’d be able to pick up on the elevated heart rates as they move closer.

The other teenager--he’ll later be able to tell it was _Trini_ from the the pattern of her heartbeat, the rapid fluctuation of her breathing like she always experiences around Kimberly--says, “I’d never say that to your face, though.”

Silence again, a moment that Alpha-5 will not be able to fill in the gaps for. There are noises. More shuffling. The sound of two bodies coming together and their heartbeats pick up again.

Then a wet smacking noise. Very faint.

Kimberly says, “Took you long enough.”

“You could have done that anytime, y’know, and I wouldn’t have complained.”

They leave a minute later. Alpha-5 doesn’t wake up until Jason arrives for training the next day, making enough noise coming in that he has no choice.

“Where are Kimberly and Trini?” is his first question and Jason gives him a look that Alpha-5 recognizes has confusion.

“They’ll be here soon, I think,” he tells him. “Why?”

“They were here yesterday,” Alpha-5 explains and he’s already playing back their conversation, trying to make sense of it. “Kimberly believes it took Trini too long to do something. No idea what. I’m still trying to understand your social patterns.”

But Jason looks like he understands. The part Alpha-5 doesn’t appreciate is that he doesn’t explain.

..

“You’re outside your grace period.”

Ernie Saft slides into the back room and tugs his apron off the back of the door, slipping his hat on over his head. He hates this apron, the way it digs into his neck. He hates Starbucks entirely and the fact that it was one of the _only_ places in the city that hadn’t gotten destroyed downtown a month or two ago.

But, when you’re nineteen, have no plans to go to college, and the Krispy Kreme you’ve been working at for three years gets punched in by some sort of space monster, you do what you can.

Keeps him out of the house at least.

“I know,” he tells Jerry, who’s sitting at the cramped desk hunched over a stack of paperwork. “Traffic.”

“You don’t drive,” Jerry says, without looking up.

“Other people do.”

It’s not busy when he goes out. Starbucks is overpriced and the people of Angel Grove know it. For the most part, they’re only busy from about three o’clock to four o’clock--once the middle school unleashes all of those frappucino-guzzling bastards upon the world.

There’s only two other people there and one of them is slumped behind the counter. The other is wiping down a perfectly clean table in the corner.

“Slow day?” he asks and Katherine nods from where she’s leaning, hardly looking up.

The door opens a second later and two girls come in. Ernie freezes when he sees them and quietly shifts to stand by the counter when it looks like Katherine isn’t going to help him out.

“Hey,” the first girl says--the one with the short hair. She’s smiling already, still laughing at something the other girl--the shorter one--said on their way in that Ernie hadn’t heard. “Can I get a grande iced vanilla latte and a grande hot chocolate?”

The girl behind her groans a little, kicking at the floor like she’s embarrassed. Ernie pretty much assumes that the second drink is for her.

“Can I have a name?”

“Kimberly.”

He makes sure to spell it right.

They sit at the table that Rocky just wiped down to wait and Ernie watches them out of the corner of his eye as he makes the drinks.

The last time he’d seen them had been before everything else happened. The first girl, Kimberly, had come into Krispy Kreme a handful of times before that and he vaguely recognized her. But the other girl was certainly new and they’d ordered two coffees and one doughnut that they’d then appeared to flirt-fight over about twenty minutes later.

It had been weird, for sure. Like something out of _Stomp_ or _Newsies_.

Something choreographed for sure, but they’d seemed too surprised, themselves, for it to have been planned.

He has half a mind to warn them that they should keep the fork-fights to a minimum in here. Then he remembers that two beverages don’t normally require forks.

He doesn’t _have_ to call her name, but Katherine doesn’t seem to know that and she says, “Kimberly,” in this loud, somewhat obnoxious voice when the drinks are done.

The other girl--the short one--gets up to retrieve them, though her and Kimberly seem to disagree on this initially. But then the other girl dashes over before Kimberly can stop her.

“Thanks,” she says and takes the drinks from Katherine’s hand, directing her polite smile to Ernie.

He nods. “Sure.”

She meets Kimberly at the table and the hand-off is full of tension that shouldn’t be there. Their hands brush together unnecessarily.

They leave a minute later, the door closing behind them and Ernie couldn’t tell you why he watches them cross the parking lot outside and get into Kimberly’s car--the easy way their shoulders brush into one another’s.

Just that he does.

“Well, they were definitely hooking up,” Rocky pipes in from the other side of the counter and then Ernie realizes all three of them are watching them.

Kimberly’s car backs out of the spot and starts off out of the parking lot.

“Definitely,” Katherine says and Ernie just nods.

No one orders hot chocolate in eighty-degree weather in California for someone who’s just a friend.

..

The bathrooms in the art department are gross. Harper Whalen is pretty sure no one ever cleans them and, if they _do_ , then they need to find a new career or something.

Mrs. Carter doesn’t seem to understand that, though, and she always hesitates when Harper asks to use the bathroom during her painting class because it takes her longer than other kids when the bathroom is just down the hall. Harper thinks she’d change her tune if she ever had to use them.

The teachers have that killer bathroom in the teacher’s lounge.

Aisha Campbell used it once on a dare and she said they even have a _bidet_ in there.

Harper doesn’t know about all that, but she thinks it’s likely. Otherwise, why would Mrs. Carter scrunch her nose like that before saying, “Sure,”?

She always goes to the bathrooms in the locker room because Coach Hammond is such a stickler about that kind of stuff. It’s not a big deal or anything.

When she gets there, it’s empty because the only gym classes are first and last period and it’s just after lunch now, so she’s got time. She’s barely into the stall in the back when the locker room door opens just outside, by the actual lockers, and she can hear someone come in and then voices.

So... _two_ someones.

“--the hell you were thinking?”

“I was thinking that morning training is stupid and a waste of time when I could be sleeping.”

The second voice, she knows. Harper immediately bristles when she hears it, narrows her eyes and then pricks her ears to hear the rest.

 _Kimberly_.

“I wasn’t thinking _anything_ ,” Kimberly continues. “I just wasn’t paying attention and a putty punched me in the face, Trini.”

Harper knows that name and her mind immediately conjures an image of that weird girl Kimberly and Jason Scott have been hanging out with lately.

“Well, you’re an idiot,” she hears Trini say.

There’s silence for a second, and then Kimberly says, “What are you doing?”

“Fixing your makeup. You’ve got a shiner, dude. You’d think you’d know how to hide it better.”

Wait.

Harper stops breathing for a second.

Someone _punched_ Kimberly.

She frowns.

It’s not that she doesn’t deserve it or anything, just that she’s surprised. It wasn’t Amanda, that’s for sure. She’d have gotten a victory text two seconds after.

And, wait. _Putty_ ? Like, as in _Silly_?

What the hell?

“You scared the crap out of me,” she thinks Trini says, but it’s a good ways away and she can’t be sure.

So Trini was there when Kimberly got decked.

Kimberly laughs, but Harper doesn’t know why.

“Sorry.”

There’s another beat of silence. Harper leans her shoulder into the stall door, feeling it creak a little with her weight, as she tries to get closer to hear.

“You should be,” Trini says.

And then Kimberly chuckles and Harper is still frowning because she doesn’t understand what’s funny about being in some sort of fight and creeping out your new weirdo friends.

“Why?” she asks, but she sounds distantly amused.

She’s so weird.

“You know why,” that Trini girl returns.

She sounds breathy and Harper scrunches her nose. It’s like she’s interrupting some romantic sappho scene in a CW show. Clearly these girls have watched one too many teen dramas.

They leave a minute later and Harper _really_ hopes they didn’t spend those seconds in between making out. By the time the door closes behind them, she can barely hold it anymore.

The next morning, half the school thinks Kimberly Hart and her new gal pal are in an underground fight club. Harper is proud of herself for about three periods and then she sees Kimberly and that Trini girl laughing in the hallway up ahead, as if it’s the most ridiculous idea in the world.

..

Fourteen-hour shifts are never fun, but Madeline Hart has had her work cut out with her since the town came under attack. It’s not necessarily the people who were actually hurt that are the problem, though. It’s the elderly men who come into the emergency room at all hours of the day, wrinkled fingers pointing to natural skin spots and claiming that they’re run-off from “aliens” or something equally ridiculous.

It’s the parents who claim their child hasn’t stopped coughing since the attack--“--the dust from the collapsed buildings, you know,” they claim--even though it’s coming into winter now and there’s _always_ some strain of the flu going around by the end of October.

She gets home exhausted, drops her things onto the front table, and remembers too late that Ted is out of town until Thursday--that it’s just her and Kimberly until then and that her daughter has no idea how to work an oven, let alone cook dinner. And it’s eight o’clock already, but she starts flipping through her phone to find the number for the closest pizza place anyway.

Ted will probably scold her for it later, no doubt, because she always ends up gorging poor Kimmy on junk food whenever he’s gone. But who has the _time_?

She certainly doesn’t. Not after fourteen straight hours on her feet.

So, she starts wandering up the stairs as she peruses the menu online, intent on asking her daughter what kind of toppings she’d like even though Kimberly always gets the same ones.

“Kimberly?” she calls at the top of the steps. “Honey, I’m going to order dinner.”

There’s no answer, which probably means that Kimberly has her music up too loud or something like she usually does.

Madeline doesn’t put much stock into it typically.

She wanders down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom and usually she knocks, but if Kimberly has her headphones in,then she’s not going to answer. So she opens the door.

And immediately wishes she hadn’t.

She looks up from her phone screen, another question about dinner already prepared on her tongue, only to see her daughter sit up in her bed with that friend of hers she’s been bringing around lately--Trini, the nice one who is always polite at dinner--below her on the mattress.

For a moment, Madeline is certain that they’d been fighting or something. Perhaps in some girlish, Hollywood manner. Like a pillow fight.

But then... _no_ . That’s not very Hollywood _at all,_ is it?

“Holy fucking crap, Mom!”

Madeline has half a mind to scold her daughter for her use of language, but that seems like it should be on the low end of her priorities just then.

Trini looks just as mortified as Kimberly and, for a moment, Madeline wonders if she may be choking, what with the shade of reddish-purple she’s turning.

“Mom! Knock or something! Oh my god!”

She’s been so surprised to find them like this in the first place that Madeline is just now realizing that her daughter is only half-dressed and that Trini is even _less_ decent, somehow.

Kimberly tries to cover herself up and looks like she’s about to remove herself from the bed to retrieve some clothes, but thinks better of it at the thought of leaving Trini completely exposed.

“I--” Madeline starts, but she doesn’t have any idea how to finish it. “Kimberly, were you…?”

The answer to that question, though, is obviously an emphatic _yes,_ she was.

“We weren’t!” Kimberly tries. “We were just--Oh, crap, Trini. Baby, breathe.”

Trini takes a deep breath and then Kimberly swings off of her and throws a blanket over her so she can sit up. Madeline’s worry and instinct takes over and she crosses the room on shaky legs, asking, “Are you okay?”

Trini nods, at least, but they don’t make eye contact. Maybe that’s for the best.

“Kimberly, I...Were you...I didn’t even know you…” She’s sputtering and not making a lick of sense, but Kimberly isn’t even looking at her.

Trini is a nice enough girl and Madeline supposes this would be much worse--she’d be _much_ angrier--if she’d walked in on her daughter with that Tyler boy she’d been dating last year. The one she punched a few months back and nearly got herself expelled for.

But no one prepares for walking in on their daughter doing something like this.

Or their son, she thinks.

Maybe just their kid.

And Kimberly looks mortified, but she also looks _happy_ for the first time since Madeline got called into that principal’s office earlier on in the school year. She looks happy enough that Madeline sort of thinks it could have been worse for a moment.

And then Trini finally breathes and Kimberly puts on a shirt and they both just look at her like they’re waiting to be punished and all Madeline can do is say, “What do you like on your pizza, Trini?” and establish a firm _Open-Door_ policy that makes both of them look embarrassed again.

Trini likes pepperoni and refuses to let Kimberly put anything resembling mushrooms on hers.

Madeline appreciates the effort, but not enough that she doesn’t briefly consider completely removing her daughter’s bedroom door entirely.

Just to be safe.

..

Pearl Scott is eleven-years-old, thank you very much. And _a half_.

She does _not_ need a babysitter.

Let alone _five_ of them.

She would like to make that very clear. Because she is eleven-years-old and some of her friends are already babysitting _other kids_ and how is it that she’s stuck at home with her brother and his friends every other Friday night these days?

It used to just be Jason, which wasn’t so bad up until a couple months ago--back before Jason got all quiet and broody in a way that makes her think of Edward Cullen sometimes. He used to be fun and they’d play video games and they’d pool their allowance to order one of those really big meat lover’s pizzas from the pizza place up the street. And sometimes he’d let her stay up late and then let her run into her bedroom and fling herself onto her bed when they heard their parents’ car pull into the driveway.

But Jason doesn’t do any of that anymore. Sometimes they’ll play video games together or he’ll ask her how school is going and then he’ll get really quiet like he has a hundred other things on his mind. Pearl doesn’t really mind. She misses how he used to be, sure, but that accident was scary and this Jason is better than the Jason that Dad let sit in jail for three nights.

And lately he’s been letting his friends come over on nights when he’s supposed to babysit and all of them will be really quiet in his room until she has to peek in through the door just to make sure they’re _alive_. Last time she had, she’d just found all five of them sort of slumped in various spots across the room sleeping.

That was a week after what happened in town with those Power Rangers and they’ve gotten rowdier now, but not by much. Pearl is pretty sure you stop being fun when you hit a certain age.

She likes some of them.

Billy is nice and he always ask if she wants help with her math homework, which she appreciates because long division is the worst and she’s dreading pre-algebra next year. That Zack kid is a little too friendly for her taste and she _hates_ noogies, but she thinks he might have caught onto that the last time when she kicked him in the leg.

That Trini girl is weird, though. Super awkward in a way that reminds Pearl of how Jason used to get around that girl he dated last year. Britt or something. She doesn’t remember.

She laughs way too much, for one, and she’s always shifting nervously. Pearl tries to give her the benefit of the doubt when she can.

Now, Kimberly Hart, Pearl _does_ like, but only because she knew her before. She’d gotten paired up with Kim and a couple of her friends during the high school football game the Jr. Cheer squad had gotten to cheer at. Kim is nice and has pretty hair and she never talks down to Pearl, which is just part of what makes her the coolest.

Pearl thinks if she _had_ to have a babysitter, she’d probably prefer it be her.

Because Kim would probably _make_ them dinner and then they’d talk or watch a movie or something and Kim is really funny. Pearl wouldn’t mind spending time with her.

But she doesn’t _need_ a babysitter and she’d fought her parents on it _again_ just an hour ago when they left for dinner and now she’s sitting in the living room trying to read and, instead, getting distracted by the laughter coming from her brother’s room.

Zack had made a joke about her wanting to spend time with her _boyfriend_ or something and Pearl had nearly kicked him again. She makes a face of disgust at the memory.

The boys her age are gross. Boys her brother’s age aren’t much better.

But there’s not a way to say something like that without getting reprimanded by her mom.

She can hear him in there and it sounds like the old him for a second, so she presses back into the arm of the couch and sighs. It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so loud. She could nearly pretend she was home alone, but she almost feels like these nights are bad for _him_ too because it means he’s stuck here.

And his friends coming over is just an attempt to make that better somehow.

It’s just him and Billy and Zack, as far as she knows, because Kim always makes a point of greeting her when she arrives and Trini usually tries to make a joke that isn’t funny the moment she steps foot in the house.

Pearl gets to her feet and walks over to the screen door, looking out at the chill evening night just beyond the balcony. It’s stuffy in the living room and she feels restless all of a sudden so she slides the door open and steps outside.

The bugs are making noise in the grass down below and she can see the edge of the hill the house is built on top of, the supports for this suspended balcony disappearing into the grass and the road is just beyond. She can just make out the curve of the front entryway, the stoop where Jason left the porch light on just to her left.

She’s just sort of standing there when she hears a noise and then she jumps. Normally, she’d tell herself not to be a baby. To either go inside or go and investigate, because it’s probably nothing.

But then that weird stuff happened with those ranger people and now she’s not sure _what_ to believe. She thinks it may be better to _not_ investigate weird noises.

Even when they sound like some kind of muffled grunt or something.

She frowns and tries to peek over to where the sound came from, curiosity getting the best of her. She isn’t ready to go inside just yet.

There’s another noise, some sort of thump against the side of the house and Pearl jumps again.

She almost wants to go and get Jason, to go inside and fetch him and tell him about it, if only because he’s bigger and played football, which means he knows how to tackle stuff.

Inside, she thinks it over. The noise is probably that stray cat her mom likes to feed.

Nothing else.

It’s definitely not some rock monster.

Jason is laughing again in his bedroom and she can hear Zack saying something that sounds like Kim’s name.

Before she really decides to, Pearl is out the front door and creeping through the grass to the side of the house where the noise came from. She left her phone on the couch, which is probably better anyway because if it _is_ a rock monster (which, it’s _not_ ), then it’s best to not alert it to her presence via flashlight before she really sees it.

She barely makes it to the side of the house. There’s another noise before she can--that weird grunting noise--and Pearl freezes in shock, pressing her hand into the side of the house to steady her balance.

She’s rethinking this whole _guns blazing/Nancy Drew_ thing when she hears a familiar voice say, “We _really_ shouldn’t be doing this here.”

It sounds a lot like Kim.

Pearl is just about to call out to her, when she hears someone else let out a muffled, “She says with her hand down my pants.”

It sounds like Trini.

But…

What are they doing outside?

There’s a new kind of noise then--one that Pearl has _definitely_ heard before. Her parents make it sometimes, in the kitchen when they’re alone or in their bedroom and she definitely heard it from the front porch a couple of times when Jason walked Britt out last year.

She knows what it is.

Kim and Trini are _kissing_.

She moves forward on shaky legs, inching closer to where they are, and then she peers around the corner of the house. Two dark figures are pressed into the wall there. Pearl can’t make them out exactly, but she knows their height difference and the basic shape of them enough to understand that Trini is the one pressed into the brick siding.

Pearl makes a face, ignores that dull thump of pain in her chest. Mostly, she thinks it might be confusion.

“Shit! Pearl?”

And, okay. She wasn’t exactly subtle.

Trini and Kim spring apart, looking flustered even in the dark and Pearl can feel her face heat up. She backs away.

“Why are you guys kissing out here?” she asks and Trini immediately looks way more nervous than she usually does, which is surprising ‘cause she usually looks _super_ nervous around Pearl.

“We weren’t kissing!” Trini sputters out, which--

Pearl is eleven-and-a-half years old. She’s not stupid.

She crosses her arms and Kim gives Trini a dirty look that Pearl mimics.

“Okay,” Trini says. “We were kissing but we _definitely_ weren’t fu--”

“Fun!” Kim cuts in, sounding crazy.

Pearl winces at her volume.

“We definitely weren’t _having_ fun, that is,” she corrects, but that somehow makes _less_ sense. “We were just coming inside.”

They seem embarrassed at having been caught, which Pearl sort of understands if Kim maybe didn’t _want_ to kiss Trini, but she’s only seen two people go at it like that in movies before.

So that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“Okay,” she says incredulously and takes a step backwards in the grass, stumbling to keep her footing. “Come inside then.”

They do.

Pearl can’t say she’s thrilled, but at least it gets Jason out of his bedroom. He stands in the living room when they come in and looks confused for a second until he seems to put two-and-two together.

“Did you scar my baby sister?” he asks and Pearl frowns.

_Baby._

Kim’s face is red and her pretty hair is messed up, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s funny that Jason called Pearl a baby, so Pearl takes that as a good sign. “No!” she says. “We definitely didn’t.”

“Kissing is gross,” Pearl decides, but she likes the way Kim laughs--has to even admit that Trini’s laugh isn’t so bad either. She seems to loosen up with it.

Her brother laughs too and so does Zack and it’s an okay moment for six people in a small house.

Pearl feels like she’s a part of their group for a second.

And then the laughter dies down and Zack says, “Um, Trin...I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your pants are, like...super undone,” and Pearl is pretty much just confused again.

Babysitting nights aren’t so bad after that. Mostly because Jason doesn’t let Pearl _or_ Kim and Trini out of his sight--which is fine, she thinks, if it means she never has to walk in on them kissing like that again.

...

**Author's Note:**

> again--most names from Power Rangers cause that's how i roll.
> 
> share your thoughts if you've got the time--here or on Tumblr at housewithoutwindows.


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